contacts

Nio prevents lost or stolen phones, laptops, kids

In addition to letting loose a string of expletives, those who have lost a phone or been a victim of phone thievery have probably reacted with the following: "Nooooo! My contacts!"

Mobile innovator Tenbu Technologies has come up with Nio, a Bluetooth security tag that links to any of your belongings. If your laptop, phone, keys, or even child move out of range, an alarm sounds.

The gadget has the potential to save your items and the valuable information they carry, like contacts.

How exactly does it work? Attach Nio to your keys, laptop bag, or other belonging … Read more

Free Gwabbit for BlackBerry on the horizon

Good news for BlackBerry business users who are pinching pennies: a free version of the Gwabbit contact manager for BlackBerry is expected to surface in the BlackBerry App World--and only in the App World--on Tuesday, December 8. The current version of Gwabbit for BlackBerry costs $9.99 for a yearlong subscription.

Gwabbit (formerly Technicopia) came out with Gwabbit the BlackBerry app back in May 2009, as the mobile version of its Outlook e-mail add-on. Gwabbit scans incoming e-mail for a signature block. If it finds one, the software compares the contents to your address book contacts. If there's no previous match, or if it looks like there's been a change, Gwabbit will prompt you to add or update the contact.

We were impressed with the convenience Gwabbit gives business users who build up their contact lists from their smartphones. Moreover, we noted how effectively and quickly Gwabbit processed the e-mails, but only so long as the sender's contact details are conveniently organized in the signature block. Gwabbit lacks the sensitivity to pull possibly relevant details from elsewhere in the e-mail.

How could Gwabbit's publisher give away its $10-a-year product for free?… Read more

iPhone app turns business cards into contacts

We live in a digital age, so why do business cards refuse to die? They're a hassle to store and an environmental suck to produce. Plus, who among us has time to manually transcribe contact info into a phone, PDA, or PC?

Needless to say, I was geeked to try Business Card Reader, a $5.99 app that turns business cards into iPhone Address Book entries.

Specifically, BCR leverages your iPhone's camera to take a snapshot of a card, then uses built-in optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the image into text and populate the appropriate contact fields.… Read more

I wear my suncontacts at night

Photochromic lenses that allow you to walk from inside to outside without putting on UV-filtering lenses have been around for decades. But the technology is just making its way to contacts.

Traditionally, these light-to-dark lenses have been constructed by coating a normal lens with a photochromic dye. When UV light hits the dye, the individual molecules expand, darkening the lens and absorbing light. Coating contacts, however, doesn't work so well.

So researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore have laced contacts with a matrix on nano tunnels filled with these photochromic dyes. Not only has the … Read more

Organized? Totally

Personal Information Managers are among the most useful kinds of software available. They can bring order to chaotic lives or help even the most organized among us wring extra time out of their busy schedules. Total Organizer is a free PIM from Konrad Papula that has some features that set it apart from the crowded PIM scene, chief among them its tree view method of organizing your tasks into folders, called "tags." These tags can belong to any number of other folders simultaneously, and it's all cross-referenced for easy searching and task conversion.

Like most PIMs, Total … Read more

iTunes Basics: Sync your Google contacts with your iPhone or iPod touch address book

Using iTunes 7.7 or greater, users can sync their Google contacts to their iPhone or iPod touch address book using these simple steps. Before syncing, users should organize their contact lists on their Mac, iPhone or iPod touch, and in Google to ensure a smoother transfer. Once you are organized (including having at least iTunes 7.7 installed on your Mac), connect your iPhone or iPod touch and...… Read more

Superhuman vision may be on the horizon

Contact lenses have traditionally been engineered to help the visually impaired see the world around them more clearly--to attain perfect, or close to perfect, vision.

But why not super vision? Why not a lens that could superimpose holographic driving control panels over a pilot's otherwise normal view? Enable Web surfing on the go? Provide a virtual world for gamers that covers their entire field of vision instead of just a plasma screen?

Engineers at the University of Washington have been asking just that as they manufacture first-gen versions of the bionic eye in the form of contact lenses with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

"Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision," writes Babak A. Parviz, an associate professor at UW who heads a multi-disciplinary group on electronics in contact lenses, in the September 2009 issue of IEEE's Spectrum. "To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs."… Read more

Life-organizing program

MSD Organizer offers to help manage day-to-day lives and much more. By offering a simple overall layout and some surprising options, this proves to be more than a fancy calendar.

We found the Outlook-style layout and detailed Help file discussing its commands to be a huge benefit to the interface and were able to quickly start working. We managed a few simple menus to populate a calendar with important dates and set reminder alarms, which again felt reminiscent of the Outlook calendar system. We were pleased when our alarm sounded and popped up on command, ensuring its accuracy. MSD mimicked … Read more

Versatile contact manager

Too many address books fall into the trap of giving users a place to keep contact information without any options for using their information outside of that program. Handy Address Book solves that problem in an easy-to-use format. Although the interface is basic, the program includes some surprisingly useful extra features.

The program's interface is nothing fancy, but it's clean and quite intuitive. Buttons across the top give users access to the program's major functions, such as adding and editing contacts. The letters of the alphabet are displayed down the left side of the program, allowing users … Read more